The newspaper is dead! Long live the newspaper!
The other day I was travelling up to London in the commuter rush hour and I noticed something; everyone was reading a newspaper. Britain is one of the largest, if not the largest, consumer of newspapers per capita in the world, so this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Yet we keep hearing that their days are numbered, so I began to wonder if that was actually true.
Being a student these days means that you’re constantly thinking of what you’re going to do after you leave university. Just having a degree isn’t enough any more; you have to stand out as being ultra-employable in the now highly competitive graduate job market. After seeing all these employed people reading newspapers, I decided to buy my own and attempt to figure out the attraction.
I bought The Guardian and one story caught my eye, “Forget free CDs, report advises newspapers”. A quarter-page article, it focused on a report by consultants Ernst & Young which talked about online advertising models and the problem of attracting younger readers. Here’s an extract:
“More than half of the UK’s 15-44-year-olds use the internet for their daily information and most of the content they access is free.
Younger age groups may never acquire the ‘paid-for newspaper habit’, says the report.”
This seems to be spot on; I get my daily news from the BBC website and via a number of specialist blogs through RSS feeds, all for free. Yet here I was, reading about the report in a paid-for newspaper.
I wondered; is reading a newspaper an institutional or generational habit? All these commuters around me were of the same age, but also worked in the same area. It was hard to tell. Maybe reading a newspaper is just one of the things you do when you go to work or maybe it’s just a dying tradition that the Web will make obsolete.
I think it’s a bit of both. Sure, previous generations are more likely to read them, but there’s something about newspapers which goes with employment and commuting. It’s good to have something to read on the way to and from work, something that’s cheap and informs you ready for the day ahead. It keeps you in the loop, able to discuss topical issues with friends and colleagues.
However, my generation won’t just pick them up as soon as we’re in full-time employment. It would be easy to live without them, with the temptation and perceived need for them is less. Newspapers then, have a fight for our attention on their hands.
One of the ways they can appear to be more modern and relevant to us is through design. I picked up The Guardian, but why that one? Although it might be regarded as more liberal than others and therefore more appealing to students, there are plenty of other respectable publications that you might choose.
The Guardian stands out for me is because its recent redesign makes it the only clean and modern newspaper out there. Block colour and a contemporary serif font are a few details which make it what is widely regarded as one of the best newspaper designs in the world.
So while The Guardian might carry stories predicting the demise of its own medium, it’s actually far safer than other publications when it comes to extinction. Its design sets it out as an established paper ready for the modern world and this should appeal to people like me who are approaching their ‘newspaper reading years’.
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